Did you know that medical professionals who market their medical practice, REGARDLESS OF THEIR PRACTICE AREA, earn 30-60% MORE in revenue than their non-marketing colleagues?
Do you have a strategic marketing plan for your medical practice?
Do you know how to create one?
If you own or manage a medical practice (whether you are a dentist, doctor, physician, or practice manager), you must develop and implement medical marketing strategies if your practice is to reach its maximum profit potential.
To market your medical practice effectively, you need specialized skills and knowledge. If done incorrectly, it can hurt your professional image far more than it will help it. Armed with the right information and tools, you can easily create and implement an affordable, ethical, and effective strategic marketing plan for your medical practice.
Physicians, doctors, and dentists have many options when it comes to finding professional assistance in developing a marketing plan. But when it comes to building your image and branding foundation, no one will understand what’s best for your practice better than you. Having a strategic plan for your medical practice is important because it will allow you to map out who you want to target, when you want to target them, how you are going to reach your target market, and whether or not your tactics are working. based on traceable results. If you’re not tracking your results, you could be throwing some serious money down the drain.
Your medical practice’s strategic marketing plan should lay out clear, concise, and realistic goals. To set realistic goals, you must identify your target market. Start identifying your target market by considering your type of practice. What demographic groups are likely to use your services? Where they are located? Do you offer a service that people would be willing to drive some distance for? This could be the case with a specialist doctor such as a cosmetic surgeon or dermatologist. Or will the people who use your services be more interested in convenience? For example, people looking for a family doctor will be more inclined to look for a doctor that they can access quickly and easily. Advertising your medical practice will only be effective if you know who you are targeting.
Once you’ve identified your target market, you need to look at your competitors. Look at where your competitors are in relation to the services they both offer. For example, a family practice won’t see another practice two hours away as a competitor, but a plastic surgeon will.
Do some internet research to find information related to your competitor and visit their website if they have one. Being familiar with your competition’s marketing efforts will help you differentiate yourself from them and shape the objectives of your own activities. Whatever you do, don’t copy your competitors! In many cases, medical practices get things wrong. For example, many practices create ineffective ads and miss the main components of engaging advertising. Therefore, collect information, but use knowledgeable and professional resources to create your promotional materials.
Once you’ve clearly identified your target market and completed your market research, you need to develop a strategy for implementing effective tactics. Your strategy will be your overall roadmap for attracting patients to your medical practice. Your tactics will be the specific actions you take to bring new patients through the doors of your medical practice.
Integrated strategies are undoubtedly the most effective way to maintain and grow your medical practice. Look for ways to use multiple mediums to communicate your message to your target audience. The tactics you use will be dictated by your budget, as well as how best your target audience will receive and respond to your message. Some tactics may include medical advertising in different forms of media, or developing a grassroots marketing campaign to generate word of mouth publicity.
Once you’ve decided on a strategy and tactic, you’ll need to develop a method for tracking the effectiveness of your plan. Tracking your results is essential to determine whether or not your plan is helping you reach your goals. Tracking can be difficult if your tactics aren’t backed by turnkey solutions, so invest wisely in your marketing vehicles and look for built-in tracking systems.
The most important thing you can do to improve your medical practice’s income is to develop a strategic plan. Without a plan you are at the mercy of the market. Even if you don’t take the time to develop a professional plan, just write a mini plan to get started.
Here’s an example of a mini medical marketing plan to get you started:
Goal: Increase the number of patients visiting the practice by 25% in the next year. Here, you have a clear goal and a defined time frame for your activities.
Strategy: Ensure that your existing and new patients have a positive experience with your practice, and in turn, they will refer family and friends. Develop a system for generating referrals using a “Care to Share” program. This shows that you have chosen to use the word of mouth strategy to achieve your goal.
Tactic: Regular customer service training for staff, incentives for staff based on word of mouth referrals; continuously entertain new ways to improve the patient experience in practice. Promote your “care to share” program within your practice. These tactics can be a starting point and may change depending on their effectiveness. The important thing is to have an initial direction for your activities.
Follow-up: Keep an Excel spreadsheet of all your patients who refer new patients using your “Care to Share” program, and also keep track of all patients who schedule appointments as a result of those referrals.
This example is about as basic as it gets when it comes to developing a marketing plan for your medical practice. Setting goals, developing a strategy, implementing tactics, and measuring success are the four core elements of your medical marketing plan. Your plan should provide a clear direction for you and your staff to follow in order to be successful. Keep in mind that aspects of the plan are likely to change as some methods prove more effective than others or new ones are introduced. Involve your staff in your marketing activities and get their support to implement your tactics. It is essential that your staff understand and participate in the activities to ensure the highest probability of success.
When selecting methods to communicate your message, make sure that your money is used to promote your practice in the most efficient way. A family doctor seeking local patients might try to advertise in a community newspaper rather than a newspaper distributed some distance from his or her office. A plastic surgeon, on the other hand, may want broader coverage and would be wise to consider advertising in all forms of print media within a certain distance.
Web marketing is also a cost-effective and efficient method of communicating with your current and potential patients. Every medical practice in every practice area, large or small, benefits from a website. People are becoming more web-savvy and turn to the Internet for information; so develop a professional and informative online presence that reflects well on your medical practice.
No two medical practices are the same, so you won’t find a standard plan to implement in your practice with perfect results. Your plan should be a clear and well thought out document that meets the specific needs of your particular medical practice. You need to figure out what will work for you and help you achieve your personal and professional goals.
